Egregious Education
The Emergence of Egregious Education
Modern forms of education can rightly be called that, modern. For only in the last century or two has the art of ignorance been so well taught to the masses through a heretical kraken known as public schools. Only we moderns know how to arrogantly assume that our current systems are in some way superior to say, Socrates’ method of didactic in the 5th century BC, the Puritan means of using psaltery to learn alphabetic constructions, or even Jesus’ method of asking questions as answers to force the questioner to open up within his presuppositions. In fact, one can hardly witness anyone asking thoroughly thoughtful questions, and this is prevalently so in modern classrooms. Rather, it seems the students are content to bite and swallow the rhetoric of their instructors, forgetting that lack of mastication can lead to vomiting spells, as logic and reasoning within the mental gut, force the indigestible hearsay in a reverse flow direction.
There is a reason those in the revered halls of knowledge, the ivory tower of scholarly idolatry, are starting to feel their rumbling peristaltic movements. The two main fallacies of modern education have putrefied within their mental bowels, and breaks for the only throne of mankind, where expulsion of the offending nutrition can be exhumed. Those two fallacies are: One, everyone can be reasonably educated to the same level (a subtle way of saying, everyone’s mind can be eroded down, like the rock in a stream; a liberal education some call it, and rightly so, for it is liberally vague and non-specific); Two, throw out all resemblances of divinity or supernaturalism, not only in science, but history, mathematics, and all the other disciplines, and true learning shall commence. The second here is the idea that learning can somehow be meaningful and prosperous without bringing the idea of God into it. This fails of course, for relativism negates itself; morality based on at least the assumption of a Divine source premises cultural cohesion.
Public education has two hidden sub-misconstructions, and is the love-child of the first fallacy and an atheistic like relative called pragmatism. The first nausea is that we measure learning by how well some personage performs on some test of memory, a percentage of right/wrong answers, limited to a specific amount of time for the test scenario. I.e., “Class you have forty minutes to answer the thirty multiple choice questions.” The second nausea is that truly gifted people who excel beyond their peers are forced to stay in the mud of ignorance for the sake of self-esteem issues of those others. (A good parallel of this is the coach that awards all his players a most valuable award so that no one else’s feelings get hurt. Of course, in doing so, he passes over the player who worked hard, kept the rules, encouraged the others, contributed with all energies, etc..)
As far as testing, it shouldn’t startle us that public education says it recognizes all children are different (learning methods), but then turns around and forces them all to learn and be tested in the same exact manner, a nation of copious clones, who come out crippled, because their particular strength was never strengthened, and their particular talent was never made room for. Anyone taking the worshipped SAT or GRE will quickly realize that these types of ‘tests’ of ‘intelligence’ are skewed to those who work well under pressure. Take two humans of comparable learning retention (again, though, how can this be tested?), give them the same test, and watch one score invariably higher. Why? One works well under pressure, with given time constraints, another likes to think things through, work out all possible solutions, and be rock solid of selecting the most correct one. People cannot be educated to similar levels, even on a broad scale, because broadly speaking, everyone is different.
Granted, not every example can be given here, but turning to the second fallacy, the reason modern education is failing is that is taking out the possibility of questioning or searching for the divine, and let us not be coy, a Maker, an Intelligence, a Being behind it all. For in learning for more than just remote retention of random factual snippets of information, one has to realize that eventually the questioner comes up against some basic tenets: What is the source of this knowledge (epistemology)? Where do these abilities come from (ontology)? Where did the worlds and the stars and creation come from (cosmology)? Why do I even seek to learn in the first place? Yes, these are philosophical questions, but that is fine, every educational discipline has a philosophy behind it, a worldview, a system of faiths or the like that guide it (curriculum).
By removing the possibility of this Reason to be sought out behind the learning, knowledge, and the like, we remove the incentive and dare we say it, the Cause. And that is like drinking water for the water’s sake, (We imbibe thee O water, because thou needest our thirst to exist) not because we desire the cool quench of its satisfactory application to our weary thirst. For why do we seek knowledge if it is not really to seek out the who, what, where, and whys of our own existence? Any stifling of that, or removal of allowance of those questions, renders modern education the spewed indigestible chunks into the flush bowl of ignorance, where purpose is whirl pooled out of sight, and out of mind.
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